It Does My Head In

As a relative newcomer, and someone of incredibly poor memory, it does my head in when we each make comments trying to remember who is living where. It is especially difficult for the newbies like me.

I hope this suggestion is received in the spirit that it is intended but could we all leave a comment about our whereabouts?

For privacy reasons you make want to give just the country, for others less concerned with such privacy a biography of up to 10000 words would be fine. 🙂

For me it would help tremendously to know who I am conversing with and where. I could then refer back to this blog when my memory fails me….where was I? Oh yes:

I live in Catalonia about an hours drive south of Barcelona.

I have been born in Nuneaton which is quite an admission in itself. The place has become an absolute dump: Correction, it always was a dump. If I count Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, children and grandchildren, it comes to well over a hundred of us. At the age of 38 I moved to Berlin where I lived from 1994 to 1999. Then on to Munich until 2002.

Due to a career move I then came back with Mrs Gaz to the West Country, where we lived for ten years in a little village very close to the river Severn. It was a lovely time and certainly not a boar.

Then, in 2011 on to France, Toulouse for three years.

Last year in October we moved down to Catalonia where we intend to stay until the ashes are spread.

Where are you?

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Author: gazoopi

After finally leaving the world of the black suit and tie, briefcase and laptop, hotel rooms and airports, and donning sandals, jeans and a flat cap, I have entered a new world of creative writing. If, through my written work, I can create a smile, cause a tear to fall or stimulate an LOL from my readers, I will be a winner!
View all posts by gazoopi

I was bored in Coventry and globe-trotted most of my working life. My wife of 25 summers and I have lived in deepest Denmark for 11 years, on an island 90 miles south of Copenhagen in the even more boring Baltic.

(You say you have been born in Nuneaton. Have you had the experience elsewhere to? 😎)

I was born in rural Kent but migrated to Wales with spousal unit 1. Departed for Memphis and then Atlanta with spousal unit 2 in 1976 a work related move . Back to Wales in the late 80s post divorce then Dallas since early 2000s with spousal unit 3. Moved from Dallas to the Pacific NW in 2003. He was retired and no one was paying him to stay any longer in such a rat hole!
We came up here because as a New Yorker of Scandinavian extraction and myself being used to wild wet Wales we couldn’t stand the heat of summer in Dallas. This is the only spot in the USA with an equable climate akin to NW Europe. We now live in Whatcom County adjoining BC Canada in the foothills of the Cascades. A very trouble free, rural place and the raspberry capital of the USA! Both of us hate cities and are very glad not to live near one of any consequence!
As you know, I garden and hate travel and holidays!

Not sure if you know that we all met on the Telegraph website and fled as refugees from various demented and unpleasant contributors, most of which needed a strait jacket or a bullet! And I might add have been pleasantly amused here now for a good few years!

I have to admit after several minutes contemplation that I had no idea where Nuneaton actually was, except N of Watford Gap! So trusty google to the rescue and I see it is half way between Brum and Leicester, oh dear! Does that say it all? Why is it such a dump? One does not hear of daily race riots etc etc In fact I don’t think I have ever heard anything about Nuneaton, generally no news is good news so please elucidate!

I was born in Trier in late 1985. I spent much of my younger life there and in the Black Forest, where my grandmother was born and raised. I have also lived for some time in the US — mostly California, but in Hawai’i, Minnesota and Idaho as well. The last is a terrible place that really shouldn’t exist but sadly continues to do so. In California I was quickly adopted as a pet by British expatriates who ensured that I would not go feral, erm, native. In the past few years I’ve been spending more and more time away from both Germany and the US.

Christine: Just to help you out a little. Nuneaton – George Elliot, Larry Grayson and …er…..that’s about it.

Sipu: Half of my genes come from Suffolk. Dad was fourteen during the war when the company my grandfather worked for was moved inland to Nuneaton due to it being so vulnerable on the east coast. Paradise is certainly the place to live out your days. 🙂

Christopher: I lived and worked in Madrid for a year. It was a busy year. Mrs Gaz and I switched each weekend in a ‘Wochenendehe” between the grassy farm country of Gloucestershire and the concrete hot jungle of the Spanish capital. Have fun, it is certainly very lively. We lived near Juan Carlos Park.

Hey Janus. FOE always corrects my grammar in German and even in English. Don’t you start 🙂 Akshully there have been a few reincarnations.

Low Wattage. We generally don’t do boats but were out on the water with our neighbours two weeks ago. I caught my first Tuna. It was great fun. See next comment.

FEEG: You seem to be the odd one out. Still stuck on the island. Good to know that someone is keeping the fort.

True, but Mrs FEEG and I have done a lot of leisure travelling in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. As for myself, I did a lot of business travelling especially to Europe and the West Coast of the USA, and I practically lived in the Netherlands and Belgium from time to time when I worked for a well known Dutch electronics company.

Born in Glasgow, brought up and educated in Aberdeen. Married an Englishman (multi-culti, y’see) and spent two years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where I worked in the Library Company of Philadelphia.http://www.librarycompany.org/

On return to England lived in London then Berks, then Bucks and then eight years in France after retiring early on health grounds. Teaching French and German (and Latin occasionally) in the private sector and bringing up family. Currently in Herts with occasional spells in France. The rest of my cousins are all in Scotland but the children and grandchildren are in England. So I’m still interested in Scottish affairs – hasn’t the SNP gone quiet recently – and in what’s happening in France and Germany.

LW, your posts about boats and boating never bore me.
Gazoopi, I like your photos.

OK, deep breath. Born and raised in Liverpool when it was quite properly still in Lancashire before the politicos gerrymandered the boundaries, but my ancestry is Manx, documented back to the 17th century and therefore with probable Viking heritage, hence the blond (well, white-grey these days in hair and beard), blue eyed estrangeiro I am today, a Scouse, Lancastrian, English and very content stranger in a strange land.

Started work in the early seventies in Liverpool as a commodities broker where I worked for ten years before being invited to manage an edible oils trading desk in the Great Metrollops. Loved the job, but hated London and being away Monday to Friday from the lady known on these pages as A Zangada, whom I married in 1982, so was delighted when the company relocated to Liverpool ten years later with self as MD.

Towards the end of the nineties, a decade in which I spent too many hours in airport lounges and asleep at 35,000 feet above the Pacific, we moved to Brisbane to facilitate business contacts with our South Seas producers. Oh, boy, was that something! It generated my undying respect for Queensland and the beautiful, friendly, rough and ready country that is Australia. This resulted in the fortuitous OZ salute I use to sign off all my comments.

The idyll ended when we returned to the UK in 2004 to face a mid-life crisis of the ‘been there, done that’ variety. With several 72 page passports each full of visas and immigration stamps, we willingly said goodbye to our former lives, sold up and moved permanently to The Cave, which we had bought as a remote, hill top ruin four years earlier and rebuilt. However, we had been here only eighteen months when death did us part and A Zangada succumbed to a sudden and fatal pulmonary embolism. It was because of this that the O Zangado (‘The Angry One’ in Portuguese) persona with the solitary, flinty-eyed, ghost of the forest avatar was born.

Since then I have been blessed to have found love and contentment again with the NSW (the New She-Wolf) and life could not be better for us. The Cave really is on top of a hill at the end of a kilometre long dirt track far away from the summer complaints, aka tourists, six km from the coast and forty from the Thpanisth border. The freezers really are full of wild boar, black pig and goat, the log stores are stacked to their two tonne limits ready for winter and the log fire is radiating cosy warmth throughout The Cave as we open a bottle of Campo da Gruta (Cave Country) vinho verde to accompany dinner.

That’s it so far.

OZ

p.s. Never hunted a Severn boar. Is it one of those porcine rare breeds? If so, a visit to Gloucestershire might be in the offing. 😀